The classic game "Super Mario World" can now be enjoyed on modern displays thanks to a new widescreen hack. You can now say goodbye to the black bars and weirdly stretched images and focus on helping the little Italian plumber save Princess Toadstool and Dinosaur Land.
'Super Mario World' Widescreen (SNES) Download
"Super Mario World" was first introduced to the world in 1990 as part of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System or SNES. Originally, the older games were presented in a smaller 4:3 aspect ratio, which can be an awkward rectangle display for those who grew up on the 16:9 aspect ratio, Game Rant says.
The "Super Mario World" widescreen hack is the handiwork of Read-only memory (ROM) hacker Vitor Vilela, The Verge says. Vilela was able to modify the original game's ROM when played through the bsnes_hd emulator. Bsnes HD is a fork of the popular Super Nintendo emulator built to allow HD, widescreen output for SNES games, PC Games explains.
What then happens is the game's original 256x224 internal screen size can be adjusted to 352x224 to give it the correct aspect ratio for a 16:9 display.. The patch should also support 16:10 resolutions and the ultrawide 21:9 is planned for the future.
You can download the patch in the project's GitHub page.
NEW RELEASE: Super Mario World Widescreen (SNES) is now available for download! Explore the new expanded adventure, natively enhanced to work with modern screens. The true 2021 gaming experience mixed with the wonderful 1990 gaming golden age!
— Vitor Vilela (@HackerVilela) June 18, 2021
Download: https://t.co/UugJXT4Fvh pic.twitter.com/BDTMIECQhP
How to Set Up The 'Super Mario World' Widescreen Patch
You first have to make sure you've got the original "Super Mario World (USA)" ROM. For copyright reasons, the download does not include the ROM. Nindtendo has also aggressively gone after sites that distribute ROMs of its games, so if you haven't for a Nintendo-approved ROM, you're going to have to get creative.
After securing your copy of the "Super Mario World (USA)" ROM, download the bsnes-hd beta core from RetroArch.
How to apply the ROM patch:
SNES Lab walks us through the process.
1. Secure a downloaded file of the game patch.
2. Have the "Super Mario World (USA)" ROM at the ready.
3. Download either FLIPS or beat.
4. Open flips.exe file.
5. Click "Apply patch" and a file dialogue will appear then select the patch file you downloaded.
6. Another file dialogue will appear and select the original ROM file.
7. The final file dialogue will appear, go ahead and type the name of the new ROM file that will contain the patch together.
8. A message saying "The patch was successfully applied," will let you know that the ROM file you just saved has the patch applied.
9. Open it in the bsnes_hd emulator.
Now you're ready to play!
Vilela notes in the Git Hub page that the BSO file must stay in the same folder as the patched ROM file and the copy should have the same file names as the ROM file. If it isn't, the widescreen setting will not load on bsnes_hd or RetroArch. Instead, you will have a completely oval title screen opening circle.
If you can't get the BSO file to work, you can open it using a text editor and manually apply the widescreen settings on bsnes_hd settings.
The "Super Mario World" widescreen hack should theoretically work on any system capable of tunning a libretro distribution and the bsnes-hd core and not just on PCs, Game Rant says.
Vilela also hopes to develop a standard hack that future ROM modders can use and apply across all SNES games.
